Last Year, 75% of companies said that their top objective was to improve customer experience. At last, companies are embracing customer experience (CX) and the benefits it can have on their ROI.

Also, since smart technologies are continuing to develop, our capacity to improve our customer's all over experience is growing. This means exciting things for the CX industry: from virtual dressing rooms where you can try on "shoes" in your living room, to robots that have your favourite recipes memorized.

This blog post puts the spotlight on CMO's, with four main technologies that they need to look out for in 2018. These technologies are all about the CX world, and if you want to create a killer CX strategy that keeps you ahead of the competition, then you should be trying to find a way to incorporate them one way or another.

1- Highly Targeted Ads

Ads are so targeted these days, that people actually believe that Facebook is listening to their conversations, they think they'll be talking about cat food with their family for instance and that at the next opening of their newsfeed: BAM! they get hit with cat food advertisements.

Not matter how conspiracy like it may or not seem, there’s no doubt that one of the biggest ways that customer experience is being influenced by technology, is with the growing ability for companies to target customers with highly personalized marketing content.

Customers are getting used to having ads be personalized to their needs and desires, they expect it, so this changes the customer experience in a few important ways.

- It improves the customer experience, by "wasting" less of a potential customer's time with irrelevant ads.

- It raises the bar for what your customers expect to be exposed to, and customers who are proper targets for your content will be seeing it more frequently and have more opportunities to engage with it.

- The customer experience feels more oppressive and controlled: customers feel like they are being watched and targeted (because they are), so they appreciate targeted campaigns that don't overdo it . You don't want to go hitting your customer with six banner ads five minutes after they leave your site for the first time...

You can try and balance the creepiness feeling it may still give, by adding in a bit of humour in.

CoPromote - facebook add

2- Virtual Reality

The second technology is the most fun way that customer experience is expanding, by incorporating virtual reality into the buying process. Companies are already looking for ways to enable customers to shop in virtual reality, whether it’s trying on shoes or glasses all the way to creating a replica of a totally customized car before the buyer makes the purchase.

It ‘s only a matter of time before VR trials become the norm of prior to purchase habits. While you probably aren't ready to start offering VR options to your customers, it’s still good to be aware of this trend because it shows a shift in how customers are purchasing.

Customers are growing into the expectation of being able to "try before they buy", so offering "free returns" on products or simply making more room in your store locations for them to try your products, is already a great way to improve the CX of your customers (at least until you can afford VR).

Technology is only getting smarter and it's leading to great progression for companies and customers alike. The best way forward, is to embrace what it has to offer to you and do what you can with the resources you have. Your customers will appreciate (and expect) no less.

3- Smart surveys

A way that companies with less AI capabilities are able to do this, is by investing in smart surveys. The technology of smart surveys has grown exponentially in the last five years, and they are enabling companies to offer a more interactive, personalized customer experience.

Smart surveys ask relevant questions to a customer base, that will allow the company to take the emotional temperature of their followers and customers, but also shape the experience to their needs. This is a low-investment, highly effective way for companies to personalize their services and make the customer experience more communication and feedback orientated.

Smart surveys can be sent out for a variety of reasons, but a typical post-purchase survey might look like the following:

Example of a Net Promoter Score - MyFeelBack

Example of a post purchase survey - MyFeelBack

4- Recommender Systems

The last technology that you need to be getting on board with, is another fancy piece of machine learning called recommender systems. In short, recommender systems is the technology that allows Netflix for instance to know exactly what movies to recommend to you. It’s also what allows Amazon to recommend products to you that you didn't even know you needed, but now can't live without!

Recommender systems are changing the customer experience in a similar way to targeted ads, because they are also significantly increasing the amount of personalization that goes into the customer experience.

Recommender systems allow the choices that customers make to guide their experience from beginning to end, offering them recommendations that will make their experience more enjoyable and more convenient. The only way that recommender systems go wrong at the moment, is that a lot of companies can't afford them, leading to quite a wide gap in the level of experience that companies can provide.

With customers getting more and more accustomed to having their preferences be known, companies that do not have the AI technology, need to go above and beyond to make sure they are keeping track of their customer's preferences and catering to them in other ways.